Oh, you will regret it. That’s like saying “Try heroin! You’ll absolutely love it.” Not technically wrong...

(Edit: I’m joking. It’s a great game.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/7lfn1w/my_friend_... :)

But it's funny because it's true! Factorio is INCREDIBLY addictive, because it stimulates that excellent feeling you get from successfully writing and refactoring beautiful code.

I actually organize my creations by thinking about hardware architecture, too. To me, Factorio is just a pretty graphical CPU.

yes, regret it you will. I've had it for a while and from time to time I see someone play it online and go "oh, I should go play that again".... just recently....

7pm: I think to myself, let's do some work on my side project... but first, lets play a little factorio

3am: FU#! :/

It is really addictive though. When you get to the point of having little helper robots that do your bidding... Priceless.

> (Edit: I’m joking. It’s a great game.)

It's a joke, but like all the best jokes it's one with a large grain of truth and exactly why I've held off buying Factorio for now (Frostpunk as well).

You're probably safer with Frostpunk. It seems much more self-contained; you'll play it through once, and then you're unlikely to pick it up again.

I'm ~750 hours deep, doing a SeaBlock run. I've never found a game with quite so much depth as Factorio.

It is actually 30 USD now, but I still think it is well worth it. (I've definitely derived 30 USD of entertainment from it!) I've bought it for myself, and gifted it to three other people. Very addicting game for programmers.

The blog is quite good too, and the interactions I've seen with the developers have been excellent. There's a reddit community too: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio

There's an active modding community as well, and several of the mods are fairly extensive; I'd recommend beating the vanilla game first, though.

For anyone on the fence about buying the game, there is a free demo[1].

[1]: https://www.factorio.com/download-demo

> Some call it "Programming: The Game".

This is actually why I haven't bought it (yet). When I have the urge to program something, I think I'd rather put that towards building something real than playing Factorio.

I love factorio because it's the most like programming without actually being programming. Opus Magnum is a game in a similar vein that came highly recommended, but I never got _that_ into because it _is_ actually programming: there's an instruction set that you program visually. Factorio, on the other hand, is closer to an RTS. Except whenever you find yourself doing something tedious, you can just put in a little more work to automate it and never have to do it again. It's the automation aspect of programming, but no actual programming.

This. My mind was blown when I realised that the initially hard to make grabber arm could be just put in a factory and suddenly I'd have an endless supply of grabber arms forever.

Sometime I think a game is too much like work, and it reflects poorly on the game. Too much grind, tedious...

Factorio for me is too much like work, except I think it's a fine game, I just already often spend my day making systems to put things on queues and take them off queues, trying to keep the queues from getting full or empty...

Exactly my experience. I feel like I'm doing DevOps automation when playing Factorio.

Since I get paid hourly for my normal work .... I started wondering, "Wait, why am I not just working right now? Same thing except I get paid......"

It should be called something like "Jenkins: The Game".

I actually had a similar experience with Space Chem. It was fun until I realized I was playing "Procedural Spaghetti Code: The Game."

I wish there was a "Functional Programming: The Game"

If you need a side project, prototyping "Functional Programming: The Game" sounds like a pretty good one.

It's different enough from actual programming that your subconscious can keep working on your real programming while you play. Be warned however, that your subconscious can keep working on your factory while you work...

I usually agree, but while it certainly feels like programming it does so in an entirely theoretical environment where both concurrency and parallelism is nearly infinite. I think that makes it feel different enough.

Might as well grab an FPGA. :)

Give it a shot. It's different enough from programming. It'll tickle the "how do I solve this" circuitry. It's a puzzle game in many ways.

I'm the same. I love it but it does involve mental work to achieve, and would rather spend the efforts into something real.

> Some call it "Programming: The Game".

I've heard it called Cracktorio.

But yes, I have seen a lot of concepts of programming in the game.

You could also call it the thinking person's Minecraft.

Factorio was heavily inspired by some of the "industrial" Minecraft mods (IndustrialCraft, BuildCraft, etc). IIRC, one of the first public prototypes of the game was posted on a Minecraft forum.

I was surprised at the minimum requirements. I don't know if I'm not up to date with current games, but from the style of it I thought it would be much lighter.

A typical game will simulate tens of thousands of entities at once, and it all needs to be updated. You can't cull by LOS because the simulation is running everywhere. There's a lot of what amounts to collision checking, where robot arms are looking for items to pick up or space to drop them off.

It's still quite performant. Some of the larger factories people have built are truly stunning in scale, yet can run at 30+ updates a second. People can host games with hundreds of players with relative ease.

At the beginning of the game, even quite modest computers will have no trouble with it, but that's not a reflection of what the game is about. Big factories are much of the point.

The facilities that you create in the game can be quite large and complex. These facilities can be processing and tracking maybe tens of thousands of different individual items. There’s a lot of stimulation workload when you reach large scale.

Unlike in a lot of games where the computational complexity is all graphics-oriented and done in the GPU, these computations are largely all CPU.

Modern laptops should generally be fine though.

I haven't looked at them, but anything slightly modern should do. My laptop (5 years old), the desktops in school (2-3 years old), my girlfriend's laptop (3-4 years old), my cousin's laptop (another girl with a not-so-beefy laptop), and my brother's laptop all run it fine... Most of those don't even have dedicated GPU.

Sure, once you go megabase scale, after a few hundred hours of playing, most hardware will lag a little. But at that point there are millions of objects the game has to track every loop, there isn't terribly much that can be done about it. The game doesn't aggregate like OpenTTD, where the number of passengers at a train stop is just a number. Because of the way it works, every piece of iron ore in a train station in Factorio is a separate object existing somewhere. (Though they do some tricks to abstract that a bit as well, see their belt compression blog posts.)

It's like a pinball machine with 6,000,000 balls in play!

Just to echo one of the points in here: the blog is full of really great details on all this, and how they've changed things, and why. One of the best dev blogs I've ever run across.

I play it on a Thinkpad T410 with an i5-M520 and it runs fairly decently. If an old laptop with a first generation i5 can run it, anything can lol

I lost at least a week of productivity after buying factorio.

After buying Factorio, I lost January through March of this year.

Worth it though. Probably the best game I've ever played.